In many contemporary computer application programs, users are allowed to maintain a set of names and/or pointers associated with documents, databases, and various other types of program or data objects that they desire to have quick access to. These conveniently accessible links, sometimes referred to as “bookmarks”, provide convenient access to any arbitrary document or location that can be referred to using a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). For example, using Netscape® Navigator and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers, a bookmark is a link to a Web page that has been added to a folder or list of saved links. When a user is looking at a particular Web site or home page, and wants to be able to quickly get back to it later, they can create a bookmark for it, and store the bookmark in a software construct referred to as a “bookmark list” or “hotlist.” The Microsoft® Internet Explorer browser, and others, also use the same idea, using different names to refer to the stored links. The Internet Explorer browser uses the term “favorite” to refer to this concept. In the present disclosure, the term “bookmark” is intended to refer to any link stored for quick access that includes or refers to a URL, and that may be directly selected by a user through a user interface, for example by a mouse click, in order to access an associated content location or document.
Existing systems allow for storage of bookmarks that are maintained privately, on a user by user basis. In order for a user to share their personal bookmarks with other users, they must typically send the links via electronic mail (“email”), and the receiving users must then manually add the links to their bookmark lists.
Some potential approaches to sharing bookmarks are to associate access control lists (ACLs) with bookmarks, or to simply make all bookmarks publicly available. A significant problem with such approaches is that they are not personalized. Accordingly, if a user shares one or more bookmarks, all other users see all the shared bookmarks. This may result in a flood of bookmarks in the user's bookmark list, and makes sharing bookmarks virtually useless. Other systems have provided replication of a user's personal bookmarks between a server and different clients, for example to support a roaming user, but they do not support sharing of bookmarks.
For the reasons stated above, it would be desirable to have a new system for sharing bookmarks that does not result in flooding of personal bookmark lists with shared bookmarks.